Resources: Conflict, Article

Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”.

Scarcity has a stranglehold grip on much of the discourse of polite society, to the point where it is simply taken for granted that just about every social “problem” is, at root, a problem that arises from scarcity. Numerous conflicts result. And the dominant perspective is constantly being challenged by unpolite society.

One of the biggest buzzwords in forest and land conservation today is “rights”. Environmental NGOs, legal activists, corporate consultants, international institutions and many others are championing “rights-based approaches” as key to effective environmental policy. But, argues this short article from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, the “rights” discourse can be a source of confusion.

Activists occasionally allow themselves to treat stories of suffering or healing as “proto-political”, or to bracket the space and time in which people experience loss as politically empty. Why dwell on endless horror stories, they tell themselves, when what is needed is comprehensive action on a higher, more political level? “Don’t mourn, organize!” goes the well-known movement slogan. In reality, argues this article from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, this "emptying out of the space of loss" can undermine political work.

The "rights of nature" debate is becoming increasingly important both in the Andean context and in the wider global political debate. This set of brief notes suggests ways of approaching the issue that may help connect it to the ongoing debate between commoners and neoclassical economists, as well as help avoid the exoticisation of the Andean concept of pachamama.

Many corporations now rely on bilateral and regional treaties to get what they want in other countries. Some companies are using Host Government Agreements to set up a specific legal framework giving them effective control over national legislation and regulations affecting their activities. Oil and gas companies are using Production Sharing Agreements to gain almost complete control over natural resources in the countries of the former Soviet Union and West Africa and in Iraq.

"Scarcity" -- not enough food or water or land and so on -- does not explain what it says it explains. Hunger, for example, is rarely the result of no food at all, but of not enough food in a certain place for certain people because those with more power deny them access to it. This may be conceded, but the claim that there will not be enough food in future because of future population growth still seems plausible. Future resources crises, however, will caused by the same imbalances of power as they are today.

Infrastructure development is the point at which many conflicts, both past and future, over resources and decision-making meet. Several projects proposed or being implemented in Turkey illustrate these points.

If the choice of whether and when to translate claims to water and land into other idioms shapes and is shaped by power relations, so too is the choice of how to translate them. The charges of “misunderstanding” and “misinterpretation” that ricochet around any conflict of interpretation are negotiating moves, not claims that can be settled once and for all by fixing on a meaning that floats free of the context of discussion and struggle.

The intersections between international nature conservation and ethnic politics are of serious and growing concern to many social movements in Southeast Asia. This paper offers evidence that international environmentalist practices interact with local and national conditions to advance the structural work of ethnic discrimination and racism in Southeast Asia. The racist outcomes of these practices do not flow exclusively from unprofessionalism, faulty science, irrationality, immorality or incorrect beliefs -- and anti-racist strategy has to accommodate this insight.

This opinion piece shows how environmental activists, ecological economists, development experts and deep green theorists tell self-serving and one-sided stories about Noble Savages, Eastern religions, “traditional communities” and ordinary householders. This "Green Orientalism" both arises from and perpetuates power imbalances. It must be constantly challenged by stories told from other points of view.

The takeover of land for pulpwood eucalyptus plantations was a major source of rural conflict in Northeast Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s, and the alliances that resulted have exerted a continuing influence on the country's politics. This 1991 article from the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (now Critical Asian Studies) outlines some of the issues involved.